WordPress Performance Optimization and Speed Improvements

DevriX is a full stack WordPress web development agency that will optimize each aspect of your web solution.

Why does website speed matter?

A slow website leads to a drop in SERP rankings (your position in Google Search pages), a decrease in your conversion rates and even website malfunction, whenever the server can’t handle all incoming requests from your visitors.

Our team of specialists will provide a full detailed performance audit of your website and establish the key bottlenecks dragging your digital presence down.

Here are some industry data that Kissmetrics have compiled on website performance:

We have written a comprehensive website performance guide for small business owners and bloggers who want to improve the loading speed of their website. It includes the following areas of improvement:

1. Available caching plugins
2. Gzip compression
3. Managed WordPress hosts
4. Resizing your images
5. Keeping the feature set simple
6. Lightweight front-end theme
7. Async script loading
8. Minimized and combined assets
9. Browser caching options
10. Limit the number of redirects
11. CDN usage

While we incorporate some of those best practices for our high-end customers, a website generating millions or tens of millions of visitors a month requires an in-depth strategy that takes care of other aspects of website performance. Various approaches would be performed for websites dealing with heavy traffic, large volumes of data, complex and extensive feature set, providing real-time data or utilizing specific solutions that depend on unique approaches.

So, what does a performance audit entail?

WordPress Database Fine tuning

WordPress stores all data (posts, pages, users, comments etc.) in the database, including all of your theme and plugin options, as well as various metadata attached to your content. This results in a huge volume of information spread across different tables and the more your data grows, so does your database.

Our team of WordPress development experts uses a proprietary methodology that allows us to analyze your database, identify data that is no longer needed and optimize your data “warehouse” for faster queries. This would speed up all pages that are fetching data from your database – single page and post views, user profiles, data archives, and admin pages as well.

WordPress Server Configuration and Tuning

Standard hosting solutions provide generic configurations that fit every website out there. Since your website is unique, it requires special treatment that corresponds to your workflow and the way that your visitors and users interact with your web content management platform. The faster your server is, the fewer resources it uses, which frees up some room for your organic traffic growth.

We will analyze your existing hosting solution and your traffic and prepare a custom actionable plan that would squeeze the best out of your current server infrastructure. If the hosting vendor allows for additional customization, we can fine-tune server parameters that correspond to your average traffic peaks.

In case you are using a low-cost shared host or a limited hosting provider, we can advise you on the suitable WordPress server infrastructure that could handle your traffic and let you grow your business without any server outages.

WordPress Plugin Optimization

Whenever your WordPress plugins cause your website to render pages with a drastic speed impact, our WordPress developers will take care of your performance issues. We will review all programmatic options that allow us to detach the features that you don’t need in order to speed up the existing plugin workflow or build custom new plugins that answer your needs and are blazing fast.

WordPress Theme Optimization

Multi-purpose WordPress themes include tons of features, assets, and styles for different industries. This makes them suitable for different verticals but brings a heavy burden when it comes to WordPress performance.

Custom tailored solutions are specifically optimized for your website. Our WordPress engineers can identify the components that are not needed based on your business case, and disable them; limit the amount of PHP, JavaScript and CSS code loaded on each request, limiting it only to the code needed for your current website.

We have developed dozens of WordPress themes from scratch that are optimized for both speed and User Experience. Our team of designers works in collaboration with our developers to create a “one-of-a-kind” customer experience built with high attention to detail, custom tailored to the needs of your business. A custom theme built by DevriX will maximize the potential of your digital presence, increasing the conversion rates by defining unique sales funnels that are both functional, and aesthetic.

Caching

A WordPress website is composed of several requests, starting from your workstation or mobile phone, passing through the network across different service providers up to the server hosting the website. The hosting itself includes several types of servers: the web server, database server, file server etc., handling different requests.

Once a web server receives a request from a visitor, it parses the original URL in order to identify the right WordPress page to serve. This page is usually a public-faced resource pulling data from the database, such as:

• a blog post on your website
• a list of products
• a service page defining your propositions

Therefore, the PHP process sends a query to the database fetching the original resource – just as a logistics rep goes to the warehouse asking for the package to be delivered back to his client.

The database query processes all data across its tables in order to extract the right resource requested by the web server. Data is passed back to the process, which therefore displays it through the remaining workflow coming from WordPress and its plugins, displayed in a way defined by your WordPress theme. All of that data is served back to your device and rendered in a beautiful manner in your browser.

Caching is a way to take a snapshot of your data or the current state of your page that could be served easily without going through all of this hassle. Therefore, once a page is generated once, it could be served “as-is” without going through all of those servers, making those complex queries that take time and exhaust resources from your infrastructure.

DevriX employs a team of software engineers profiling in all aspects of your infrastructure: networking, server management (Linux, nginx/Apache, PHP/php-fpm, MySQL/MariaDB), programming languages like PHP, JavaScript, and SQL, and optimizes each aspect on every step of the way.

WordPress Image Optimization

Every media asset loaded to your website should be fetched from a remote server and rendered back on your screen. Due to the variety of screens available out there (different resolutions on laptops through landscape and portrait views on mobile phones and tablets), images should be scaled accordingly which leads to serving large media assets that are heavy and using CPU usage to resize them to the right fit.

Additionally, images are often not compressed, or icons are fetched separately instead of as a sprite – a single file incorporating multiple images at once. We will create different image sizes for your views, render the right dimensions for different devices, and compress media on upload which would result in fewer requests and smaller image file sizes.

 Front-end performance

Our front-end engineers will furthermore analyze the finalized HTML page generated by WordPress. We will limit the amount of 3rd party resource requests, combine CSS and JavaScript files together, minify them and make them more compact and easy to grab whenever a client sends a request to your page.

We use a variety of automated tools that keep the code clean and reusable and limit the number of files (and their sizes) when serving to the client. This is paramount for sites with larger traffic and mobile requests which have limited bandwidth resources.

Offloading requests to external sources

Often your media is served directly from your server which adds additional load that could be used for more traffic. Instead, we connect to different 3rd party providers hosting your media (such as Amazon S3) which does not pollute your file system and incorporate CDN (Content Delivery Networks) which spread your assets across thousands of servers worldwide.

Whenever a client loads your website, all assets are fetched from the nearest (geographically) server which saves time for loading the complete resources and frees up availability for your server for more traffic.

By analyzing your system we will reveal potential vectors that can be optimized in order to avoid server outage and inaccessible server resources. By applying the right caching mechanisms we will protect your data from traffic spikes and offload it in different ways by reducing the load to your server resources.

Our WordPress retainer program is custom tailored to the needs of each and every business. We are proficient in maintaining high scale websites dealing with millions of unique visitors and tons of content. We conduct monthly performance benchmarks and code reviews in order to evaluate the speed impact of every component interacting with your website.